Deploying several hundred troops to Rome, Bolonga, Palmero and Naples, among other cities, the Prime Minister announced that there will be a broader presence in the coming days.

The government said that the troops are intended to free up more local police as well as monitor areas with high immigrant populations. They have been assigned to high-crime areas as well locations presumed to be targets of terroist attacks.

In May police detained 400 illegal immigrants in what the government saw as a first step toward lowering crime. According to the Times of London, 118 of them are to be expelled from Italy for a variety of crimes including drug dealing, prostitution and robbery.

Italy has recently seen a marked trend toward nationalist politics. In April Gianni Alemanno won his bid for mayor of Rome on a campaign that profiled statistics that purported to show a link between immigration and rising crime rates.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was re-elected with heavy support from the Northern League, an anti-immigration political group. The deputy head of the Northern League, Robert Maroni, is the country’s interior minister and the chief of a task force charged with “the Roma problem.”

National forces were deployed over the weekend to several cities across Italy, with the stated purpose of protecting potential targets of attacks and to monitor areas with high immigrant populations. A complete force of 3,000 are scheduled to be on the street by the end of the week, with possible future deployments being reported in the local media.

Former EU commissioner and current Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini refuted claims that the current administration is “xenophobic,” yet said that EU immigration policy needs to be “updated.” Said one person interviewed near the site of the riots, “The gypsies don’t work, they don’t wash, and they steal. This is our version of ethnic cleansing.”

Italian opposition leader Walter Veltroni, who lost to Berlusconi in the national elections, condemned the Naples attacks, calling them “very grave.” Reports Irish paper The Sunday Business Post Online, “There are some 7,000 Gypsies in Rome. … Many Gypsies arrived from the Balkans in the early 1990s when ethnic conflict raged there, but other Roma families have been in Italy for generations and some trace ancestors in Italy to the 15th century.”

NPR’s Sylvia Poggioli reports from Rome on the rise of the Northern League, which draws largely from traditionally left-leaning electorates in northern Italian cities such as Milan. Poggioli notes that the party “traces its roots to the Celts rather than from the people of the Mediterranean. Its campaign poster features a Native American with the tag line, ‘They allowed immigration and now they live on reservations.’”

Berlusconi's latest move comes amid international criticism surrounding both his handling of immigration issues in Italy as well as a legislative move that would shield the four highest political offices in the country from prosecution of any kind. This immunity would exclude the Prime Minister from any investigations, past or future.